Deprecate, Depreciate, Discontinue Deciphered

By on January 14th, 2009

Don’t you just love alliteration? :)

I’ve now dealt with few migrations from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005; SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 and SQL 2000 to SQL 2008.  However there still seems to be a lot of confusion around what is supported on which version and whether something is deprecated, depreciated or discontinued.  So first off, let’s get some definitions:

Let’s start with the third – Discontinued.  These features have actually been removed completely (See Notification Services and * join queries).  This will cause an upgrade to break and should be addressed prior to migration.

In the context of SQL Server, Deprecate and Depreciate essentially are the same thing – Features are Deprecated (i.e., we’re encouraged not to use them) because those features were Depreciated (Microsoft has said that they will be removed and/or replaced in future version), however they technically will still work.  These are features such as DTS, where SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 can still run them, however no features are being added and it will be discontinued in a future version.

So when upgrading you should be aware that the deprecated code/features can still be used and won’t break the upgrade, but there’s a newer way to accomplish what you need to do and you should migrate to doing it that way because (1) it will be supported going forward and (2) it’s usually a better, more efficient process.

  Deprecated Features Discontinued Features
SQL Server 2005 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729(SQL.90).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144262(SQL.90).aspx
SQL Server 2008 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144262.aspx

Tools to use for Upgrading:

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